The closeup looks nice. I've been working on a snow scene for my lighting tests and thought of an extra tweak for snow using fake stones (Fake Stones should possibly be called Round Thingies to avoid tunnel vision for its use ). I left it rendering at home and if it works well I'll post it later.

It's a little rougher than I would like in some instances. I'm going try to get a snow drift effect somehow (smooth on one side, clumpy on the other). "Round Thingies" just doesn't roll off the tongue the same , but it is a very versatile tool indeed.

I've used fake stones for a sandstone texture I'm working on, using *very* small stones. It seems to work reasonably well, providing a textured surface while maintaining a smooth shape. The render I have running is just using a fake stones shader for a covering of fine "powder" on top of this clip file. If it works it may be quite useful for snow when you want a nice smooth surface that still looks like snow.

It doesn't seem to have too detrimental an effect on render times. Render times only seem to increse when individual stones start taking up a few extra pixels in the image.

I was also going to try this with Lucio's but I screwed up one of the nodes and have to go back to the beginning to find out what I did wrong. You posted this just in time for me to swap it over before catching the train

Height above foreground is about 2m. Having some problems closer up due to the underlying terrain... more work to do.

<edit> You can see some "stippled" patches in the foreground. With fake stones providing powder on the surface, the scale of the displacement fractal can be greatly increased to smooth the snow surface. I haven't seen what this does to the margins though. I'll have to check this later. Attached is variation of this clip file. It still needs tweaking but it gives you something extra to play with. Input link is the input of Snow layer 01, output from the bottom fake stone shader (Powder Snow).

The render below is much closer to the surface than the above test image.

I sould emphasise that the two renders in the previous post are not from the same viewpoint. The second is a lot closer to the edge of the ridge in the right/center. Combined with the very oblique angle of the lighting the snow looks a little too crunchy. I'm repeating the larger render as the first one actually had the fake stones shaders in the wrong order and didn't display properly.

In the first render you can see darker patches in the foreground. These are areas where the displacement has created a sharply ridged surface, with snow disappearing from the steeper sections and shadows exacerbating the darkening. The second version doesn't have this problem at all with the displacement fractal being scaled at least 100x from memory.

Thanks for posting the original clip My version has only addressed one aspect. I'd be interested to find out if it simplifies tweaking the edges and other features.

Hmm, could look like fluffy snow with a miniscule billows displacement maybe?

I've done some tests using just the fake stones shaders and they look pretty good. I'll post the clip file for these when I've finished. I think these could be pretty useful for what you're doing because you can concentrate on creating the underlying displacement without having it complicated by an additional fractal to roughen the surface.

Changed the height of the stones to 0.3 and added a default shader for translucency/reflectivity. Just have to tweak the colours. Looking good towards the sun.